News archive

A folder containing letters, photos and family documents was Franziska Gerstmeier’s motivation to retrace the fate of the family of her deceased husband, Gad Klein. His Jewish grandparents, three aunts and an uncle were murdered or had died in concentration camps. Two children in the Klein family had managed to escape....

The first inmate transport reached the newly established Auschwitz concentration camp on June 14, 1940. Among the 728 Polish political prisoners was Wilhelm Tomasik, inmate number 544, from Cracow. The SS later deported him to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he managed to write a letter to his mother in the...

Paul Dostert, historian and longstanding director of the Centre de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Résistance/CDRR) in Luxembourg, paid a two-day visit to the International Tracing Service (ITS) late in July 2016. Last month Dostert had assumed chairmanship of the International Commission that sets down the...

Véronique Dubois seldom saw her father Walter Stern. She knew next to nothing about his past and his family. After sending an inquiry to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in 2011, she received extensive information about her paternal relatives. As Jewish Germans many of them had been deported and murdered. Now...

“In addition to fulfilling its tasks of keeping the memory alive, the ITS would also like to make a contribution for today’s society“, said the Director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) Floriane Hohenberg at the public lecture “The refugee crisis and human rights in terms of my work for OSCE and the ITS”.

Dagmar Lieblová was the only one in her family to survive the Theresienstadt ghetto and Auschwitz Concentration Camp. This past weekend she spoke about her fate to some 60 guests in the synagogue in Vöhl and read from her book „Jemand hat sich verschrieben – und so habe ich überlebt“.

Last Saturday, Elie Wiesel passed away at the age of 87. The Holocaust survivor and writer was regarded as a significant voice of remembrance for the victims of the Shoah. Wiesel had survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps and, to the end of his days, was a committed activist in confronting racism and...

Lorraine Willson travelled from Australia to Poland and Germany with her husband David with a view to retrace the path of her parents’ lives. While visiting the International Tracing Service (ITS) she received documentation about the time her parents spent as Displaced Persons (DPs) and the steps they took as DPs in...

New ways to access the documents in the ITS archive, an increase in the number of inquiries and interesting projects showing the different avenues of research: The Annual Report 2015 provides a look at the work of the ITS and is now available online at the ITS website.

The interactive web-documentary “Im Märkischen Sand” (In the sand of the Mark) commemorates the April 1945 massacre of 127 Italian forced laborers in Treuenbrietzen . As part of a photo series within the project, documentation from the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) illustrates the NS bureaucracy of...